Nowadays, much business communication is done electronic messaging, such as e-mail. People send and receive enormous amounts of information as data attachments, in-line text and, more commonly, document links.
The problem with using linked documents is that if a link points to a non-shared resource/document, it becomes useless to the recipient, as the underlying information is not accessible to the recipient.
For example, user A may send an email message to User B with some document link contained in it. This document link may be a Universal Resource Locator (URL) pointing to a document from a database that is local to User A but is not accessible to User B. User B receives the email message with the link but cannot access the document since it is not in a shared location accessible by User B.
Examples of links that may be sent in an email message that aren't accessible by the recipient may include, for example, a Notes document in an email database (db) on a client or a server, a sender's file system, e.g., file://c:/readme.txt, and a link to a file/document in a personal “mydocs” library, such as Workplace Documents Library. This is not a complete list of links that may be sent that are not accessible by a recipient but are just a few examples.
Most e-mail client software, like Microsoft Outlook (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Wash.), and Internet/email service providers, like Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail, do not have the feature to convert a link pointing to a non-shared document to a form accessible to recipient, prior to sending the email. This results in an undesired delay in sharing the information in the document. Obviously, this becomes an important issue if the link is to a document containing time sensitive information.
Accordingly, there is a need for a technique for making a linked document contained within an email message accessible to a recipient.